Celebrating the physics of all that flows with Nicole Sharp, Ph.D.
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Why Fishing with Dynamite is So Harmful
In some countries, there are still people using dynamite to catch fish. This practice is incredibly destructive, not just to adult fish but to the entire marine ecosystem. A blast wave traveling through air loses some its energy to the compression of the gas. Water, on the other hand, is incompressible, so the blast wave’s…
Microscale Rockets
Shown above are a trio of microscale rockets, each about 10 microns in length. These tiny rockets are roughly cylindrical in shape, with a narrower diameter at the front than the back. Like their space-faring brethren, these microrockets are chemically propelled. They draw in fuel from their surroundings, which reacts with the catalysts coating the…
When Lasers Strike
Lasers are a great way to deliver a lot of energy very quickly. In this animation, you see a jet of water get struck by a pulse from a powerful X-ray laser. The energy from that laser pulse gets absorbed by the water in a matter of picoseconds – that’s trillionths of a second. All…
1500 Posts!
This is FYFD’s 1500th post! Can you believe it? Fifteen hundred posts is a heck of a lot of fluid dynamics. I’ve covered everything from the teeny tiniest scales to the astronomically huge, from events that happen in the blink of an eye to ones that require decades of patience. Today I encourage you to…
Diffraction
Wave phenomena can sometimes be a little difficult to wrap one’s head around. In this video, Mike from The Point Studios explains wave diffraction and why opening a window can help you spy on the conversation next door. Diffraction occurs when waves encounter an obstacle. If that obstacle is a slit in a wall, the…
Wingtip Vortices Visualized
In flight, airplane wings produce dramatic wingtip vortices. These vortices reduce the amount of lift a 3D wing produces relative to a 2D one. How much they influence the lift depends on both the strength and proximity of the vortex. The stronger and closer it is, the more detrimental its effect. One way airplane designers…
HIFiRE
Earlier this month, an international team launched a successful hypersonic flight test in Australia. The Hypersonic International Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) Flight 5b was launched atop a two-stage rocket and reached its maximum speed of Mach 7.5, well above Mach 5, which defines the start of the hypersonic regime. The purpose of this particular flight test…
Skating on Vapor
Turn the stove up high enough and you may have noticed that drops of water stop boiling away and instead skate across the surface. This is the Leidenfrost effect, which occurs when a surface is so much hotter than a liquid’s boiling point that any liquid that contacts instantly vaporizes. That thin vapor layer insulates…
Why Does This Kite Look So Real?
A recent viral video features mesmerizing footage of a giant octopus kite flown at a kite festival in Singapore earlier this month. The kite’s arms twist and wave lazily in the breeze. Watching the video, I was struck by how realistic the kite’s motion looks. It really looks like an octopus is just cruising there…
The Reverse Magnus Effect
A good soccer player can kick the ball from the corner of the field into the goal thanks to the Magnus effect. But if you’ve ever tried to play soccer with a smooth ball, you may have noticed that sometimes the ball bends the wrong way! This is the reverse Magnus effect and it’s caused…